By Otto Spijkers
On 17 September, our Minister for Development Cooperation, Mr. Bert Koenders (see picture), came to our University to explain his policy on development cooperation. In that speech (which will be published, hopefully very soon, on this website), the Minister clearly adopts a human rights based approach to development. In most of the Minister’s speeches, the focus is on the individual, rather than the state. Many of his speeches have little anecdotes or stories in them, about how the Netherlands has helped one particular man or woman improve his or her quality of life, both in the sense of more freedom and more food. Here is one of these little stories, beginning with a description of the difficulties and then what happened (in this case: what will happen) afterwards:
Let me introduce you to Rana – a poor Bengali farmer eking out a living on the banks of the river Brahmaputra. For years, he has been trying to protect his crops from the water. In the past few years, the river has burst its banks more and more often, and it is becoming more and more difficult for Rana to keep his head above water. A few years ago, two thirds of Bangladesh was flooded, a disaster inextricably linked to climate change. Rana doesn’t need a television or newspaper to tell him about the effects of climate change: hotter weather, more hurricanes and higher water levels. Slowly but surely, the river is swallowing his land. He used to have three fields, now he only has two. Rana’s family wants to move, possibly to the town, but Rana doesn’t want to leave the land that was his father’s. […] Like a few other citizens from the former Third World, [Rana]’s been invited to the G10 summit by the American President Obama. Rana will tell the world leaders gathered there how Bangladesh succeeded in adapting to climate change, thanks to international aid. With a grant from a local NGO, Rana himself set up a company that builds ingenious floating gardens, where you can grow cucumbers and aubergines..
An important question is whether the Netherlands is alone on this human rights based approach to development, and other values, such as security (our Human Rights Ambassador, Piet de Klerk, recently embraced the concept of human security and noted that ‘An emphasis on human security is closely related to a human rights based approach to development in which the rights of individuals as laid down in the different UN conventions are the starting point of any development process’). It seems that some nations adopt a more old-fashioned, state-centered, approach. This may lead to frictions: for example, as we are building bridges and digging water wells in one part of Afghanistan to increase the human security and development of the local people there, in another part of the country – and sometimes even in the same part – another nation focuses on fighting the Taliban, often without much consideration for the fate of the local individual. Both are necessary, but it is somewhat doubtful whether the two approaches can be so easily combined. In previous posts (see here, here, and here), I discussed the human right to development, and mentioned that the Millennium Development Goals may focus on improving the life of the individual, but, somewhat surprisingly, without referring to human rights law. A rights-based approach focuses on the individual in defining the targets, as the MDG’s do, but also in efforts to realize these targets. In setting out his policy, the Minister notes two consequences of his rights-based approach to development cooperation. First, the Minister calls on all individuals to contribute, rather than leaving it to the state:
Development cooperation is not just a matter for the government, but for society as a whole. Everybody is responsible for ensuring that global poverty is halved by 2015. We have mutual responsibilities and mutual interests, both within the Netherlands and as part of the global community.
Second, the aid is sent to local groups, rather than to governments alone:
[..] the minister promotes partnerships with civil society organisations, enterprises and knowledge institutes in rich and poor countries alike.
– Otto
Hi Otto
Well, I did get a bit carried away here! Thanks for the kind words
Hello Michael,
I thought I was the only philosopher here! But I cannot compete with Law versus law; that is philosophy of the highest abstraction? Your anecdote about the Vietnamese communists is really interesting, because it shows how the dilemma has actual consequences too.
Hello Michael,
As usual, there is a lot to learn, for me at least, from your comment. I agree that in a sense, (human rights) law is ‘just another tool’, and whether to use this new tool or not depends to a large extent on its effectiveness. After all, what’s the point of using a defective tool, just because you appreciate the underlying theory or idea or value so much! One could argue that to use a defective tool is not helpful for anyone, except perhaps for the philosopher, who finds that with the adoption of a human rights discourse, in his ideal world, it all finally makes sense. And this brings me to a role of law I appreciate very much: that it can help define our goals, our values. In that sense, law also plays an important role. Not as a tool, but as a description of what we wish to achieve. (I’m being a bit philosophical and pretentious this morning, hope you don’t mind too much.)
Hi Otto, Hi Nick
This is an interesting topic indeed, and Otto and Nick great posts! There is an underlying problem, however, in my view with asking whether societal development may be best promoted through a rights based approach. It presumes a coherent — and shared — notion of the role of law in society. Despite the rapid development of public international law over the last half century, this still does not exist as a global phenomenon, and I am not sure whether we should make bringing it into existence our top priority now. Rights do not grow on trees. They are a product that people create and nurture over time through institutions (here I mean institutions in the broadest sense — repeated patterns of behavior in groups) — and those institutions are both private (family, schools, etc.) and public (state related). In my view, the main development issues tend to boil down to dysfunctional institutions. Focusing on improving functionality by enforcing individual rights may succeed to a certain extent (promote the welfare of individuals is always a good thing). But if we do not also develop corresponding tools to make institutions responsive to new ideas (including but not limited to ideas about rights), we are likely also to create new fissures between groups that undermine this success. Because we do not share a global vision of how rules should be used between groups, “rights chit-chat” (developing a universal agreement on a rights based language) may empower individuals but they also can be divisive for group formation. As an aside, rights language also can be overly homogenizing (there is an interesting NYT article on this by a US legal theorist from Yale if anyone is interested). Put another way, don’t we need to understand better how to make legal institutions more efficient learning institutions? Why is it that we do not focus as well on improving the efficiency of the private (group, individual) and public interconnections as a learning process? This is the basis of the so called ?community justice” movement in the United States. Community Justice demands that legal institutions put at the highest priority responding to the needs of the community that they serve. This has some rather radical implications especially for criminal justice. I do not think ?community justice” should be the only way to improve functionality of legal institutions, but so far these people seem to be the only ones developing strategies and new institutions that better connect people to institutions using law. So I question whether one should succumb to the temptation that more and stronger rights are the answer. In my view, they are just another tool. Paraphrasing Carl Llewellyn, without functioning legal institutions norms are just pretty play things.
The link does not work in my comment, probably because of the bracket at the end. To go to the Commitment to Development index and see that the Netherlands is world champion, please click here.
Hi Nick,
Thanks for your comment. Thanks especially for noticing the reference to Obama. That was a joke, of course. The Minister was describing a vision of the future, and apparently his favorite for the American Presidency is Obama. I was present when the Minister delivered this speech, and I can tell you that the joke worked: we were all laughing.
On a more serious note, I understand that you approach the question on whether to adopt an individual- or state-centered approach to development from the perspective of effectiveness: what works better to fight poverty. Of course this is essential. However, you could also look at it from a more conceptual, theoretical, point of view, as I tried to do in my posts on the human right to development.
And yes, we are the reigning world champion when it comes to development assistance (see http://www.cgdev.org/section/initiatives/_active/cdi). It doesn’t cost us much (around 1 percent of the budget, perhaps even less), but it does magic for our image. In fact, I don’t really understand why other countries do not see the cost-benefit analysis as we do.
Interesting post Otto. I’m not sure who this “President Obama” you write of could be, but he sounds good to me. I have always been a fan of the human rights and “development as freedom” approach championed by Amartya Sen and others, but I still have my doubts. Although many third-world governments have their problems, and development assistance based efforts to reform governments and governance are sometimes misguided (see my previous post on Indonesia and corruption), I can’t think of (m)any examples of sustained development without a significant involvement by a highly competent technocratic state. I’m also not sure how these individual, small gestures contribute to important political human rights (freedom of religious worship, democracy, a free press) can ever be addressed by such a “micro” approach. Still, I commend the Dutch for at least meeting the UN aid target. I wish Canada would get its act together.